Simple tips for a user-friendly website

In 2016 we’ve seen plenty of eye-opening web design trends that aim to improve functionality whilst showing off the latest advances in graphics.

But although simple features like hamburger menus offer a quick way for users to navigate to their chosen area, other new devices such as parallax scrolling and front-page carousels can not only seem a little generic, but can inhibit user functionality and even harm your site’s performance.

So before you go ahead with your plans to introduce complex typography and lots of advanced JavaScript to your site, here’s a reminder of some simple tips to ensure that your website is user-friendly.

Main content

When a user lands on your page, it’s thought that they’ll usually spend less than fifteen seconds evaluating whether they want to keep reading, or will hit the back button. So regardless of whether your site is providing cooking tips or casino games, placing the main content of the page front and centre is critical to helping them find the information that they came your site for.

Simple aesthetics

Similarly, rather than cluttering up your site with lots of data-heavy preloaded images and videos, keeping a site stripped back to a simple black text on a white background is an easy way to aid functionality, and as these examples show, black and white doesn’t have to be boring!

Navigational issues

If your site holds a lot of content, it’s critical that you include some simple navigation tools to help the user find their desired information. Hamburger menus have been a big hit in design in 2016, but even a simple navigation bar at the top of the page such as the one found at https://casino.betway.com/ can do the trick in helping users quickly find their desired games of poker, bingo or roulette.

Here and now

One issue that many websites overlook is providing the user with information regarding how recently the site was last updated. The internet is littered with sites containing stale information that’s no longer relevant which is why even updating the copyright information at the bottom of the page with the correct year quickly informs the user that your site contains fresh and relevant material.

Mobilegeddon

And finally it’s essential to make sure that your website is optimised for smaller screens now that we’ve entered the mobile era. Using hi-res images, a view-port meta tag, a font size of at least 14px, and removing the default zoom are all simple steps that can be undertaken so that whether it’s a gaming site or a fashion blog, you can make sure that your site provides a user-friendly experience on a wide range of devices.

About The Author

Edwin is a passionate blogger who started his career in blogging four years ago. He loves writing about WordPress, web design, tutorials, jQuery, graphic design, Photography, and everything about new innovations and happenings in the Web world. When not blogging, he loves spending his time in social networking.
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